Raipur Smart City The Dream City of Aspiring Minds

Raipur is one of the proposed smart cities under “Smart City Mission” of Government of India. Various initiatives have been taken by the Raipur Municipal Corporation in this direction, says Rajat Bansal, Municipal Commissioner, Raipur Municipal Corporation, in an interview with Arpit Gupta of Elets News Network (ENN).

21st century, the century of per cent of population dwell ing in city, there has emerged a lot of ideas of making cities better place to live in. In the queue, the next hot topic is the concept of Smart City. Smart City – A city providing high quality life to its dwellers, by integrating economic, social and environmental sustainability.

On account of making the above possible, there must be congruity on the urban administrations setups, various parts of the system must meet up as a major aspect of community, each having their impact, to create, execute, and manage an incorporated arrangement of measures.

In a quest to develop Raipur as a “Smart City” Chhattisgarh Government is striving to keep all the parts integrated and working. The Chhattisgarh Government has planned a citizen centric and citizen derived Smart city. In the endeavors, in making of Raipur a Smart City, the vision with four pronged approach comprising of “Clean, Connected, Cohesive and Credible (4Cs) Raipur being adopted. Raipur Municipal Corporation (RMC) has come up various schemes with equal participation from citizens running out parallelly.

“You don’t build your roof until you’ve finished building the walls. And you don’t build walls until you’ve finished building the foundation of your house. Big empires are built in baby steps, that is – one at a time”. Following this concept, RMC is working on the model of ABD.

The concept of Area Based Development focuses on the sustainable growth of the city where every area of the city is equally contributing in the development of the city. It is an area specific, participatory, integrated and inclusive plan to develop the whole city. In this approach, a small area of the city will be selected and development work will start on it. Once the development is completed of the targeted area, some other area will be selected. Following this concept, every area of the city will be chosen. And one by one, the whole city will be developed. This will also take in to account key learnings from the ABD project implementation and a model to sustain and continuously improve the city parameters towards making it a “smart city”.

Under this model, many areas & establishments of Raipur are being developed. Anand Samaj Library, the oldest library of Chhattisgarh established in the year 1908 is being converted into an elibrary. Up-gradation work with modern facilities with increased sitting capacity, addition of new books, parking space, Wi-fi, CCTV cameras, air conditioners, modern toilets and water facilities are being carried out. This will help in developing interest in the community to socially connect and motivate them to acquire information and knowledge leveraging the modern facilities.

Motibagh, located at the heart of Raipur city, is being developed as an entertainment No hub. A pump track is being developed for the kids so that they get the feeling of cycling on a mountain terrain. A maze made of bushes is being develop, Musical Fountain, Surface water small river, Botanical Garden, Open Air Theater, Soft Walking Track, Artificial Waterfall, Grass Mound, Drinking Water, Toilet, Parking etc. are to be developed. This initiative is towards upliftment of quality of life in the city.

“Mor Raipur App”- To make all the civic amenities available to its citizens at their fingertips. Raipur smart city has launched a mobile app “Mor Raipur”. A first of its kind initiative in Chhattisgarh, This app “Mor Raipur” and get latest updates about the activities of RMC, 24/7, within few clicks.

Any city would prosper when its citizens are a proportionate part of its development. With this view only Raipur Municipal Commissioner Mr. Rajat Bansal aims at making Raipur more Clean, more Connected, more Cohesive, more Credible.

The overall development can be easily concisely described to the practices of these 4C’s. Initiatives which will be practice in regard of the stopper composition of Smart City has a centralised basement system which will improve the cleanliness of the city implemen¬tations like vending zone licensing in places like Canal linking road MG Road Ravi Bhawan Kalibari Chowk extra would give shape to Cohesive Raipur. Projects like Chhattisgarhi 36 is an excellent example of credible Raipur in which the mass of people would decide the places which they want to develop under Smart City and projects getting largest reviews would be selected for redevelopment.

Another popular project being undertaken by RMC under the ABD model is open gyms. A healthy heart track is being made at Indoor Stadium, Raipur. Mayor Promod Dubey, along with Nagar Nigam officials have proposed this plan to enrich the fitness level amongst the Raipurians.

You don’t build your roof until you’ve finished building the walls. And you don’t build walls until you’ve finished building the foundation of your house

Many ICT led smart city interventions like City-Wi Fi, Intelligent Traffic Management System, Smart Parking, GPS based vehicle tracking for solid waste collection, bin level monitoring etc shall be implemented to improve the service efficiencies and citizen convenience in the city.

In order to ensure centralized monitoring and management, an integrated city operations and command center shall be implemented which shall be able to take data from various type of sensors implemented in the city and shall help in Integrated City level monitoring and management. Open Wi-fi spots are being installed in various locations of the city. It has already been installed at Marine Drive, Telibandha; and the plans to install it on all other popular locations of Raipur are on go.

Also, with an aim, to make Raipurians fit and healthy, Raipur smart city launched a fun filled fitness campaign in the heart of the city near Telibandha Lake, from 4th December 2016 and is held on every Sunday morning. Wherein, Raipurian reclaims the road for fitness and lots of fun.

An innovative concept “Matargashti” implemented in the city is marked by a lot of momentous performances, with sports activities like cycling, skating games like basketball, volleyball, football and many more. Along with the fun factor Matargashti act as a platform to aware people about health and fit­ness. This initiative by Raipur Smart City Ltd. is highly appreciated and other administrative bodies are also organizing such events in their constituencies, marking the success of Matar­gashti Har Umar ki.. Such initiatives have tremendous potential to improve happiness index of a city.

Providing digital platform, to advanced technology and all necessary services to the citizen, Chhattisgarh has changed for the good in the past few years paving a strong way for ‘Smart City Raipur’.

Cities indeed have always marked the pinnacle of material achievement of a civilization, but they also hide the dedication, hard work and perseverance of the people who were involved in making it so, whether they are the visionaries planning for it or the people accepting and adopting the changes.

This metaphor for urbanisation and future urban development of smart city needs to be revived among all the citizens and visionaries who are going to be the part or smart city Raipur.

Urbanisation is no doubt the future, but it not only means creating efficiencies by building concrete towers & bringing together all the facilities at one place but also exploring the organic growth of the city.

Smart city is highly misunderstood with only implementation and integration of new technologies instead it not only adoption of sustainable and innovative technologies, but also it includes increasing people’s participation for that growth, their approval and their acceptance. This is the vision of RMC Commissioner Rajat Bansal.

It is important to note that wherever people observe uncertainty it is accomplished with flexibility. People need to accept that project with high flexibility that are applicable even after decades required Time and Patience.

Thus, the vision and purpose, not perfection, must be made the milestones for judging the success and development of a well planned smart city, quoted Rajat Bansal, with the idea of ‘Mor Raipur’ to be justified.